SEND and Alternative Provision

Debate between Claire Coutinho and Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi

Monday 6th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

My hon. Friend is passionate about this area. She is absolutely right, and I have heard from parents in my area and across the country that it is the daily grind of poor communication that can wear them down. We will set out more guidance and training for SEN caseworkers in councils, and better communication standards, to stop that happening to parents.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

The Children and Families Act 2014 set out national standards in legislation, but families, parents and guardians of children with special educational needs and disabilities in Slough regularly lament that they feel completely let down because even those legislative safeguards have failed to provide support for children and young people. After so many years of failures, why does the Minister think that announcing new standards and a plan with no legislative underpinning will deliver better outcomes?

[Claire Coutinho]

A combination of plans within the strategy will support that. We have seen an increase in need and better awareness of different conditions, so the national standards will bring together the best evidence so that people’s needs are met consistently and at a high quality across the country. On accountability, we have improved the area inspection framework by recognising that we need to bring in not just education and councils but health partners.

Childcare: Affordability and Availability

Debate between Claire Coutinho and Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi

Tuesday 20th December 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mr Dhesi]

I thank the Minister for the various facts and figures on the amounts that the Government are pledging. Will she commit to reinvesting the £2 billion that her party has already pledged into the childcare system?

[Claire Coutinho]

I am not entirely familiar with that figure. Perhaps we can discuss it after the debate and I can come back to him with a fuller answer. As I have said, over the last five years, we have spent £20 billion on early years. Not only are we supporting the sector with the money that I have set out today but we are also supporting it with energy support. I know from talking to lots of people in the industry that one of the things they are worried about is energy bills. We have set out significant relief over the winter to help with that issue.

Funding increases are taking place across England. In the constituency of the hon. Member for Slough, I am glad to say that the hourly funding rate for two-year-olds will increase by 62p to £6.87 an hour, and the rate for three and four-year-olds will increase by 6p to £6.27. We have also already announced an additional £10 million for maintained nursery schools supplementary funding from 2023-24. We are introducing a minimum and maximum hourly rate that a local authority can receive for their maintained nursery schools supplementary funding, to create a fairer distribution of that funding. The minimum rate will be set at £3.80 in 2023-24. Slough is one of the local authorities that will benefit from this new minimum hourly rate.

As well as increasing our support to providers, we also want families to benefit from the childcare support they are entitled to, saving them money and helping to give their children the best start in life. We know that childcare is a key concern for parents and recognise that cost of living pressures are impacting families across the country, which is why we are committed to improving and refining the offers that we have in place. We have also put many direct cost of living measures in place, from furlough to energy support relief, and direct family household support this year as well.

One of our key areas of support is the 30 hours free childcare entitlement, a Conservative commitment introduced in 2017, which has helped hundreds of thousands of working parents get back into the labour market, with nearly 350,000 children registered for a place this year. The entitlement saves those families up to £6,000 per child per year. That offer of 30 hours of free childcare is making a real difference to the lives of eligible working families. In our 2021 childcare and early years survey of parents we found that 73% of parents reported having more money to spend since they used their 30 hours and 38% thought that without the 30 hours they would be working fewer hours.

Education

Debate between Claire Coutinho and Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Ministerial Corrections

[Claire Coutinho]

As I said in answer to earlier questions, we put an extra £0.5 billion into the early years sector in the 2021 spending review to increase the hourly rate, split over the three-year spending review period. We are also spending money on qualifications and training for teachers. This sector is very important to us, and we continue to consider all the ways we can support it.

Accessible and Affordable Childcare

The following is an extract from Education questions on Monday 28 November 2022.

[Mr Dhesi]

The Government are knowingly underfunding the entitlement to 15 or 30 hours of childcare by over £2 per hour, thereby forcing providers to cross-subsidise and leading to astronomical costs for parents. New Ofsted data shows that 4,000 childcare providers closed within the year to March 2022, thereby further limiting access to childcare. When parents are having to pay more for their childcare than on their rent or mortgage, and adults without children are saying that childcare costs are forcing them out of parenting and precluding them from that, does she agree that she and the Government are presiding over a broken childcare system?

[Claire Coutinho]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that question. Childcare is of course enormously important, and it is this Conservative Government who have expanded the childcare offer successively over a number of years. Last year in the spending review, we set out an additional £500 million to come into the sector, and we are also supporting private providers with their energy bills this year.

[Official Report, 28 November 2022, Vol. 723, c. 637.]

Letter of correction from the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho):

An error has been identified in the response given to the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi).

The correct response should have been:

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Claire Coutinho and Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi

Monday 28th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

3. What steps he is taking to help ensure childcare is (a) accessible and (b) affordable.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Claire Coutinho)]

We are committed to improving the cost, choice and accessibility of childcare, and have spent more than £20 billion over the last five years supporting families with the cost of childcare.

[Mr Dhesi]

The Government are knowingly underfunding the entitlement to 15 or 30 hours of childcare by over £2 per hour, thereby forcing providers to cross-subsidise and leading to astronomical costs for parents. New Ofsted data shows that 4,000 childcare providers closed within the year to March 2022, thereby further limiting access to childcare. When parents are having to pay more for their childcare than on their rent or mortgage, and adults without children are saying that childcare costs are forcing them out of parenting and precluding them from that, does she agree that she and the Government are presiding over a broken childcare system?

[Claire Coutinho]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that question. Childcare is of course enormously important, and it is this Conservative Government who have expanded the childcare offer successively over a number of years. Last year in the spending review, we set out an additional £500 million to come into the sector, and we are also supporting private providers with their energy bills this year.

Rail Strikes

Debate between Claire Coutinho and Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi

Wednesday 15th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dhesi]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, but the true fact of the matter is that the Secretary of State has not even tried. He has been missing in action. The unions, including the RMT, have been asking for negotiations. Indeed, there have been discussions over the past couple of years, but the unions have been highlighting that many of their members have not received a pay increase for the past couple of years. As I said, they have not met since March. The Secretary of State needs to show leadership and hold an urgent meeting between Ministers, employers and the union. Sadly this behaviour is indicative of wider incompetence when it comes to managing our transport network.

[Claire Coutinho]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the unions called a strike before they saw the finalised deals of a pay plan?

[Mr Dhesi]

As I highlighted, they have been in negotiations for the past couple of years. I am talking about wider incompetence, so let us take Transport for London and the Government’s failures in securing a long-term funding deal. That has left Transport for London in limbo, leaving it no choice but to make cuts to services in the face of a lack of Government support. Ministers are playing political games, where the only losers are the hard-working British people.

Why are the Government choosing to cut when they should be choosing to invest? Instead of delivering on a rolling programme of electrification, they are scrapping huge parts of HS2. I see the Rail Minister, the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), laughing from a sedentary position, but the Government scrapped the eastern leg of HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail to boot. Why are they choosing managed decline, when they should be choosing growth? Why are they cutting services, when they should be cutting fares, as many of our European neighbours are doing?

We could have a rail network with affordable, reliable services where more people want to travel by rail, helping us to address the climate emergency. Instead, the Government are focused on punishing rail passengers, punishing key workers on our railways, and presiding over the managed decline of our railways with £1 billion-worth of cuts imposed from the top. A decade-plus of Tory government has driven our transport systems into the ground, and the pandemic has catalysed that process to crisis point.

The Labour party will always stand to defend the rights of working people, the British people, who currently face a blistering cost of living crisis in the wake of a global pandemic. Workers are looking to the Government for answers, but the Government simply do not have a plan: no employment Bill, which has been promised for the last three years; and no progress on fire and rehire.

I have just been in a debate in Westminster Hall, which I managed to secure, on fire and rehire. Not one single Conservative Back Bencher managed to attend that debate. They simply do not—[Interruption.] They say they were here. Many other Members from the Labour party, the SNP and the Democratic Unionist party attended, but not a single Conservative Member from the Government Benches was there to support their Minister, because they do not believe in workers’ rights. They do not believe in supporting the British people who are going through this cost of living crisis.

Now, the Transport Secretary seems intent on jeopardising the right to strike at all. If his Department wants to move forward, I suggest that what it should be doing is negotiating, ending the strikes next week, and giving our transport system the attention it rightly deserves.